Experience is the cornerstone of Epicurean philosophy and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Epicurean views about the nature, formation, and application of concepts. ‘The Epicureans on Preconceptions and Other Concepts’ by Gábor Betegh and Voula Tsouna aims to piece together the approach to concepts suggested by Epicurus and his early associates, trace its historical development over a period of approximately five centuries, compare it with competing views, and highlight the philosophical value of the Epicurean account on that subject. It is not clear whether, properly speaking, the Epicureans can be claimed to have a theory about concepts. However, an in-depth discussion of the relevant questions will show that the Epicureans advance a coherent if elliptical explanation of the nature and formation of concepts and of their epistemological and ethical role. Also, the chapter establishes that, although the core of the Epicurean account remains fundamentally unaffected, there are shifts of emphasis and new developments marking the passage from one generation of Epicureans to another and from one era to the next.

This chapter investigates the critique of anthropomorphism that we find in Xenophanes of Colophon and Heraclitus of Ephesus. Hesiod’s Theogony is assumed as background and as paradigm for the tendency to treat either the world’s components or gods generally as humanlike. With Xenophanes of Colophon we have the first and one of the fiercest attacks on such a kind of anthropomorphism, inasmuch as Xenophanes not only challenges anthropomorphism in traditional religion and myth but also intimates that at the root of religious beliefs and practices, among his fellow Greeks as well as among foreigners, is a motive of philautia, of self-love. Another strong early critique of anthropomorphism is found in Heraclitus of Ephesus, who curtly dismisses the idea of world-making by a god and stridently attacks certain traditional forms of religious worship. And yet neither thinker can avoid sliding into a particular kind of anthropomorphism, namely into what Mourelatos calls ‘epistemic anthropo-philautia’ – philautia understood not as the ‘self-love’ or ‘vanity’ an individual may show, but rather as the species-philautia we indulge in when we project upon the cosmos structures and forms that cognitively afford special intuitive appeal to us human beings.